The external events of everyday life evoke or trigger specific emotional, behavioral, and/or physiological responses in individuals. These responses provide an important source of information for a physician or a therapist in order to identify a problem or dysfunction, and suggest a treatment or develop an individualized therapeutic procedure. Review and analysis of these responses can also help individuals to raise their awareness of response patterns to certain situations so that they can improve their reactions. In fact, various psychological therapies, such as cognitive, behavior, etc., are aimed at identifying and changing habitual reactions and response patterns that may cause an individual to feel anxious, depressed or angry.
Accordingly, the ability to track external events and individual behavioral, emotional and/or physiological responses to those events could be a very useful tool for various health applications. Such a system can also be utilized for personal security purposes, when a particular emotional or physiological reaction can trigger selective transmittance of a signal to alert friends, relatives or a specific agency based on the danger and urgency.
A number of systems are known, which are designed to provide remote monitoring of a person.
The typical structure of such health monitoring systems can be described as containing a sensor part for sensing a biometric signal on a patient being monitored and a patient electronic data collection system to record data that is collected by the sensor. A processing part is also supplied. The processing part analyzes, or compresses, or otherwise processes, the recorded data. A communication part is typically supplied and, which is used to transmit signals wirelessly to a centralized server over a telecommunications network, a medical care provider or a database. Wearable devices with the above properties are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,287,252, entitled “Patient Monitor” filed on Jun. 30, 1999, by Lugo; U.S. Pub. No. US2002/0019584, entitled “Wireless Internet BioTelemetry Monitoring System And Interface” published on Feb. 14, 2002, by Schulze et al.; WIPO Pub. No. WO 01/26021, entitled “Remote Patient Assessment System” published on Apr. 12, 2001, by Anderson et al.; WIPO Pub. No. WO 01/71636 entitled “Personalized Health Profiling System And Method” published on Sep. 27, 2001, by O'Young; and WIPO Pub. No. WO 02/27640, entitled “System And Method For Wireless Communication Of Sensed Data To A Central Server” published on Apr. 4, 2002, by Whittington et al. In some of these systems additional information is also available, such a patient identifier, authorization for the access to the database, etc.
Other personal portable systems that can be found in the patent literature are primarily designed for security and tracking applications. Thus, a signaling system for rendering an alarm for an individual in distress combined with a locating and tracking system of alert and direct appropriate personnel to the needs of the individual in distress and to monitor location of that individual was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,742,233, entitled “Personal Security And Tracking System” filed on Apr. 21, 1998, by Hoffman et al. The described system comprises a portable signaling unit, a remote alarm switch device, a central dispatch station, and a wireless communication system such as a cellular or telephone system, etc., and a GPS or similar system. The portable signaling unit and the remote alarm switch may be adapted to be worn at different locations on the person's body. When the wearer activates the remote alarm switch or manual alarm switch in a dangerous situation or when the signaling unit or its alarm switch are removed forcefully, data are transmitted to the central dispatch station, where the user identification, stored personal information, the nature of alarm and location of the wearer are displayed.
A more sophisticated system, which is capable of generating a distress signal, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,294,993, entitled “System For Providing Personal Security Via Event Detection” filed on Sep. 25, 2001, by Calaman. In this system, event detection is performed by detecting a wearable sensor that detects changes in physiological signals. One embodiment of the system uses a sensor that detects changes in galvanic skin response which is a change in skin conductivity. The system can also operate in a manual mode: when the user manually initiates the distress signal. When the sensor detects that an emergency situation has arisen, appropriate emergency management services are contacted.
While some of the described apparata record and transmit physiological signals of the user, or manually entered signals of emergency, none of them is capable of additionally registering external events in the form of images or video. Therefore these systems do not allow establishing connections between specific external events and person's reactions to them for the benefit of the user's health and therapy. These types of systems do not permit an independent assessment of the real danger or its causes in security applications, because an external event, which is causing an alarm, remains unknown at the emergency service location.
Various methods are known in the art for deriving affective information based upon a user's reaction to an image. One example of a system that monitors physiological conditions to derive affective information is a wearable capture system that enables the classification of images as important or unimportant based on biosignals from human body. This system was described in an article entitled “Humanistic Intelligence: “WearComp” as a new framework and application for intelligent signal processing” published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 86, pp. 2123-2151, 1998 by Mann. In his paper, Mann described an example of how the system could potentially operate in a situation when a wearer was attacked by a robber wielding a shotgun, and demanding cash. In this case, the system detects physiological signals such as a sudden increase of the wearer's heart rate with no corresponding increase in footstep rate. Then, the system makes an inference from the biosignals about high importance of the visual information. This, in turn, triggers recording of images from the wearer's camera and sending these images to friends or relatives who would determine a degree of a danger.
Another example of such a system is described in a paper entitled, “StartleCam: A Cybernetic Wearable Camera” published in: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 1998, by Healey et al. In the system proposed in this paper, a wearable video camera with a computer and a physiological sensor that monitors skin conductivity are used. The system is based on detecting a startle response—a fast change in the skin conductance. Such a change in the skin conductance is often associated with reactions of sudden arousal, fear or stress. When the startle response is detected, a buffer of digital images, recently captured by the wearer's digital camera, is saved and can be optionally transmitted wirelessly to the remote computer. By setting a high threshold for the startle detector, the device will record only the most arousing or threatening events. This mode of operation would be most useful for a safety application in which images of the threatening events are transmitted to secure websites of the wearer's “safety net” of friends and family. In another mode, the camera can be set to automatically record images at, a specified frequency, when very few responses have been detected from the wearer, indicating that their attention level has dropped. This mode can be useful at a meeting or a lecture. Such selective storage of digital images creates a “memory” archive for the wearer which aims to mimic the wearer's own selective memory response.
The systems proposed by Mann, and Healey et al. make use of the physiological signals to classify images as “important” (stressful) (i.e., causing rapid change in a biological response) and “unimportant” (ordinary) (i.e., not causing rapid change in a biological response), and trigger the wearable camera to store and/or transmit only the “important” images. However, their systems have several shortcomings.
The described systems do not associate, do not store, and do not transmit the physiological signals (or any other “importance” identifier) together with the corresponding images. As a result, the “important” images can be easily lost among other images in a database, since there is nothing in “important” images indicates that these images are “important”. This can happen, for example, when the digital image files are used on a different system, when the images are transferred via a CD-R or other media, when the images are uploaded to an on-line photo service provider, etc. The described systems also do not associate, do not store, and do not transmit user's identifier together with the corresponding images. Therefore, when the system is used by more that one user, it is unable to distinguish which user reacts to the image as “important” or otherwise significant.
Further, the above described systems provide only binary classification “important-unimportant” or “stressful-ordinary” and do not allow a finer differentiation of the relative degree of importance between the captured images.
Additionally, the described systems provide image classification only based on “importance” attribute. For example, they are unable to differentiate whether the important image evoked a positive (happy) or negative (unhappy) reaction in the user. Therefore, a wide range of human emotional reactions (e.g., joy, sadness, anger, fear, interest, etc.) is not considered in the system and cannot be used for monitoring and analysis purposes.
Although some of the above described systems can be triggered by a physiological signal that is indicative of a specific user's reaction to an event as suggested by the galvanic skin response to store and transmit corresponding images, these systems do not have the capability to be triggered by a pre-specified image characteristics, such as a particular subject matter (i.e. a familiar person), scene type (i.e. indoor-outdoor), etc.
Finally, the above described systems also do not have the means to provide a feedback to the user with respect to certain individual reactions to external events, which may be important for specific health and security-related purposes.
The absence of these characteristics in the above described systems limits the scope of the usefulness with respect to health and security related applications by, for example, preventing a further analysis of a person's reactions toward certain situations at a later time as there is no association with a person's identifier and physiological signals. The process of tracking changes in the reactions to similar situations with time (no triggered capture of specific events), which is beneficial for the therapeutic purposes, is also not supported.
Consequently, an additional need exists for an improved system and method for recording and interpreting user's emotional reactions to a scene at the moment of capture an image of the scene for subsequent association of this affective information with the captured image. A user identifier together with the triggered transfer of captured images associated with the characteristic reactions as well as the user's captured reactions associated with the characteristic images.